the intertextual21 experiences promoted by such other art forms as post-
classical filmmaking which, with their modernist techniques, similarly
implicate the spectator within the fiction.22 Thus, the contemporary
spectator will become a participant, will get closer to the artist as they will
both share the production of the work. In consequence, when the audience
gradually becomes more involved in the work, it is increasingly difficult for
them to differentiate between the artificial world that is being co-created
and their personal experience.
Today, Virtual Reality is a technology that offers us certain social
solutions (such as flight simulators and similar learning devices), promises of
a ‘better life’ and what is not promised, their reverse: the creation of
labyrinths of confusion between virtual worlds and reality. We have to accept
that Virtual Reality is something new and therefore it involves various
problems in our understanding of it. One of the difficulties that an analyst has
to face nowadays when examining Virtual Reality is intrinsically
methodological: how can we evaluate new realities when our tools for
analyzing these realities are obsolete? It is important for us to pretend that
we are confident about our conclusions and analysis; in some sense we need a
stable and fixed point to establish our knowledge even though our pillars can
paradoxically be virtual. We are aware of our ‘paralysis’; we have the
certainty of not being able to solve the problems that new technologies are
demanding and not even to find names for them, able only to employ an
inadequate theoretical language to deal with this new phenomena. Sherry
Turkle provides a useful definition of our current cultural context and the
influence of virtuality in our lives. It is one, she says, based on:
The erosion of the boundaries between the real and the
virtual, the animate and the inanimate, the unitary and the
multiple self, which is occurring both in advanced scientific
fields of research and in the patterns of everyday life
(Turkle, 1997:23).
21 For useful explication of intertextuality in cinema, see Robert Stam (1992).
22 Robert Kolker offers a valuable reading of the modernist techniques of directors such as Scorsese and
Altman (2000). For a useful account of the emergence, economics and aesthetics of Post-Classical
filmmaking more widely, see Geoff King’s New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (2002).
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